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**Myles Borins:** There is spec work being done right now on AudioWorkerNode which would work more similar to web workers, and I believe they might even have access to SharedArrayBuffers, which would solve the delay issue... Although it would now create the complexity of multiple things maybe \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you trade one for the other. Well, cool. I look forward to the day when I can load VST plugins into the browser and just go for it... Which doesn't seem too far off -- I imagine wasm even takes the distance between the native stuff even closer. So it seems like getting those nodes to have zero la... |
Break: \[23:41\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay, next we're gonna talk about -- I think this is a little bit of a jumping off point... There was a fun issue lodged on the TypeScript repo that claimed that TypeScript was too incomplete, and there were some people with some requests for mathematical proofs... But he had a pretty compelling exampl... |
I think he was mostly saying "If you stop the recursion part of this, it'll stop", but it was just kind of a funny issue that, like, you add enough complexity in your type system on top of your language and suddenly you have another Turing complete language on top of your language. |
I don't know if there's too much to talk about from this... Have you guys ever seen the Turin complete CSS games, and stuff like that? |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** Do you know how those work, can you explain it? |
**Rachel White:** No, I don't know how they work. \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So it always requires input... If you haven't seen the CSS games -- the most simple example of CSS that works like a program would, versus one that works in a way that styling would is a slideshow. If you think about check boxes as having a style around checked or unchecked, you can kind of like ... |
You can actually do the same thing to make a game. Tic-tac-toe is an interesting one, to where you can theoretically make check boxes that have x's or o's, but you can make the game have a win state, like say "You won" if it detects any of the potential win states as like, you can imagine, like a selector that has the ... |
**Rachel White:** So isn't the majority of the time that people make the Turing complete CSS projects when -- it's to refute the notion that CSS isn't a "real" programming language? |
**Alex Sexton:** \[28:05\] I think that it's more just for fun. Definitely no one is suggesting that people should use CSS like this, I think. The slideshow is maybe a good example of something that could work, but the tic-tac-toe is unreasonable, and I don't think anyone's saying that. It's the ideal situation. |
**Rachel White:** So I guess what is the importance of having a language be Turing complete? I guess it's just another abstraction that's Turing complete in regards to the issue that we're talking about, but what is the importance of that necessarily? |
**Alex Sexton:** I wouldn't say that there's an importance. I think it's more like exploration as fun. I think the person who wrote the issue did a good job of kind of making light of the situation, saying "No one cares about this. This is just a funny thing." You could turn it off if you didn't want -- because in this... |
I think more than anything it's just like a fun exploration of taking technology to its limits and exploring areas of it that weren't for an intent, but then being able to do crazy things because of that. Other things that come to mind are using -- there's a language called JSFuck (you can bleep that later), which is c... |
**Rachel White:** Actually, that's just an abstraction of the esolang Brainfuck it sounds like. I don't know if you're familiar with that. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I am. It's not... It's similar, but it uses very specific properties of JavaScript to where it can kind of bootstrap itself by grabbing letters off of prototype functions and then eval-ing them, all based on positions and arrays... It's very interesting-looking, and it doesn't really work the sam... |
I think it's just a good example of doing something entirely unexpected with a language. It falls into the category of uselessware that I think you and I have talked about, Rachel, before; at least on Twitter, maybe... Of just like building something for the sake of saying "This is cool and fun and weird", but no one s... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. I mean, I think it takes a certain type of person that has a full grasp, a full down to the nuts and bolts grasp of a language to be able to even get down to figuring out that kind of stuff... At least from my perspective, as someone who does not have a full grasp of a language. Not even English... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... \[laughs\] Sorry, I was saying 'yeah' to myself. \[laughter\] Yes, you are bad at English, Rachel. I do find it really fun to try to get so deep into some topic to where you can kind of flip it on its head, break the norms and do something interesting and cool, even if like -- there's a reason ... |
\[32:17\] Myles, can you think of -- this is a little bit on the spot, but can you think of other things in this vein? I know you tend to gravitate -- not gravitate, but you tend to be associated with a lot of projects that do similar... For instance, making a piano that has a tunable middle A, and programmable interva... |
**Myles Borins:** Can you just give me a tiny bit more context? Which norms are we talking about? Are we talking about language norms, or...? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I'm just trying to find more examples of this stuff. The situation with TypeScript is we have a thing where someone wanted to add, like "Alright, we wanna type-check integers in these places" and it's like, "Okay, now we have more complex types and we wanna do this and this", and eventually yo... |
It's a fun game to play, but I don't think anyone is going to be programming in TypeScript types anytime soon, if that makes sense... I think this question is potentially just a bad question. Do you have any thoughts on the topic? |
**Myles Borins:** I think that I know where you're going at here, which is like the beauty of combinatorial complexity... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. |
**Myles Borins:** You see this happen a lot-- and I'm gonna bring it back to audio, because I'm in that mood now. You see this happen a lot in algorithmic composition, or any sort of generative environments, where like where you get things that are really interesting is you may have one thing that's like repetitive and... |
A really good example would be, I've seen a performance where there was like four or five different voices that are playing in there. They're playing different patterns, and each of those patterns have a randomness value that can be added that will randomize the patterns, and this performer mapped that to a fader. So y... |
I think that's kind of what you're talking about, where you create this combinatorial complexity, and within this complexity come these new higher level attributes that you can work with, and then you can use those as the means in which you program. |
I think you see that happen a lot in environments like Ableton, or like other kind of programming music environments, where you're no longer worrying about the notes that you're playing, so you can focus on other aspects of the song, such as the timbre, or playing with compressors, or just like effects and stuff like t... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think it's a -- for the tough question that I asked, I think it's a good example of kind of like just taking these side effects of something and using that as kind of your core. It's like someone allowed randomness for one purpose, and then you take randomness and now you're making randomness t... |
\[36:16\] I think it's a thing that kind of -- again, it's always gonna sit on the fringe, but I think it's an art, just like that person kind of created art out of the randomness... Noticing things and doing, like, the CSS games, and all these edge case situations I think definitely falls in the realm of beauty and ar... |
It's similar to -- I think it's called like A Single Div...? Is that a thing? |
**Myles Borins:** Yeah. Oh, who did that again? That was such a beautiful project, from India. |
**Alex Sexton:** a.singlediv.com. I'm gonna go ahead and start into the projects of the week -- sorry, the picks for this week. My pick this week is gonna be A Single Div. A Single Div is an interesting website where CSS developers get a single div and they create icons and pictures and cartoon characters and scenes an... |
**Rachel White:** Cool. |
**Alex Sexton:** Rachel, do you have a pick this week? |
**Rachel White:** I do, only because I asked someone for suggestions and they gave me a good one... |
**Alex Sexton:** Nice. |
**Rachel White:** Full transparency... So there is this project that came out this week called StackBlitz that is an online VS Code IDE for Angular and React. I just hit my microphone, sorry. Basically, it lets you create Angular and React projects that are immediately online, so you don't have to push anything to prod... |
**Alex Sexton:** Myles, I'm potentially putting you on the spot, but did we tell you to try and pick something ahead of time, or do you have anything new? |
**Myles Borins:** I do just-in-time picks, and I've got it... Just in time. |
**Alex Sexton:** Cool. |
**Myles Borins:** \[38:56\] It's a GitHub repo called Omnitone. It's from the Google Chrome Org. It's a library for doing spatialized audio. It's built on a lot of the stuff that I was talking about earlier. It's a robust implementation of a first-order-ambisonic decoder, and a binaural renderer. It allows you to take ... |
The thing that's really cool about it too is if you're doing any stuff with Web VR, you can use this in conjunction with Web VR to do spatialized audio that will actually move around with the movement of your viewer. |
**Alex Sexton:** Nice, that's really cool. Well, this episode got into the weeds a little bit more, Myles, and I tend to be bad at staying on topic. I don't apologize... Hopefully, you enjoy one episode like this and hopefully Mikeal can be back and ground us a bit. |
**Rachel White:** Hey, it's better than nothing... Better than nothing. |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. |
**Myles Borins:** You don't realize you're basically apologizing in saying that I'm better than nothing, right? \[laughter\] |
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